Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Gutenberg & Co.

I enjoyed exploring Project Gutenberg, the first site I recall hearing about when the e-book revolution began rumbling into town. Project G. prides itself on using what it calls "free plain vanilla electronic text" in an effort to make as many texts as possible available to as many people as possible, regardless of fads and foibles in operating systems. I did find the site easy to use. Browsing was uncomplicated, and the advanced search option allowed me to zero in on specific texts, for example Cervantes' Don Quixote in the original Spanish. Copyright restrictions, if any, are clearly set out if you want to download a book. The service is free and you don't have to open an account. Pretty simple, and I can see how valuable this tool could be for students and researchers who want to access materials not owned by their local libraries or even kept under surveillance in the rare books room of an academic library. It's a great way to expand the collection at no charge and without wasting precious space on hardcover texts that are rarely consulted. It would also help the student who's failed to nab the last copy of a reading list classic; no library has an inexhaustible supply of any title.
While browsing, and quite by accident, I found a title I remember seeing in hardcover as a child visiting much older relatives who kept everything in print they'd ever acquired. Maida's Little Shop, a children's book about a frail little girl who regains her health by running her own store, was published around 1906. Who would have guessed it would be scanned and made available a century later on the Project Gutenberg site?

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